From Meiji Modernity to the Nanjing Massacre: Yasukuni‘s Critical Perspective on History and Memory[1]

Li Ying’s (fig. 1) documentary Yasukuni, completed in 2007, was screened in various film festivals in Asia and, notably, won the Humanitarian Award for documentaries at the HKIFF in 2008. When it was finally released in Japan in 2008, it sparked a lively and at times violent debate about its portrayal of the Yasukuni shrine, where the souls of 2.5 million soldiers, including 1000 war criminals, who died in service to their country are commemorated. The film, a pan-Asian production, with 7.5 million yen (US $75,000) in funding from the Japan Agency for Cultural Affairs,[2] set a new box-office record for a documentary in Japan.[3]

However, the film’s release met with considerable difficulties. The director and the producer received death-threats, which prevented Li Ying from attending the premieres. A group of Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lawmakers requested a special screening, and initiated a campaign against the film that highlighted the fact that a Japanese government agency had financed a film by a Chinese director critical of one of Japan’s sacred places. This campaign was led by LDP lawmaker Inada Tomomi, who appears in the film and is well-known in Japan as a leading historical revisionist. A lawsuit was filed against the director by another man, who appears in the film and claims his right to privacy was violated. The plaintiff’s lawyer, Takaike Katsuhiko, was also head attorney in two famous lawsuits brought against Nobel laureate Oe Kenzaburo’s for his book about the mass suicide of Okinawans ordered by the imperial army in the last days before Japan’s surrender in 1945, and against journalist Honda Katsuichi regarding the “100-man beheading contest” (hyakunin giri kyoso) during the Nanjing massacre.[4]

The present paper focuses on the film’s approach to the history and the memories enshrined in Yasukuni and attempts to examine why it touched such a raw nerve among certain groups of Japanese society. I analyze the film as a critique of the “modernist historiography” associated with nation building and the political uses of memory.

Nanjing in the Context of Meiji Modernity

Fig. 2: Newspaper reports on the infamous “one-hundred man beheading contest” held by two Japanese officers using Yasukuni swords.

Li Ying has underlined that “Nanjing and Yasukuni are connected”: his idea for the film was first triggered by a revisionist symposium on the sixtieth anniversary of the Nanjing massacre, during which the audience applauded images of Japanese troops entering Nanjing.[5] Its release also coincided with the seventieth anniversary of the Nanjing massacre. For this reason, although the massacre itself is not discussed at any length in the film (the beheading contest, which is treated in several archival photographs illustrating how the Yasukuni swords were used, is related to Nanjing [fig. 2]), the film should also be seen within the larger framework of Sino-Japanese films and literary works about Nanjing.

The Nanjing massacre has proved an attractive but slippery subject for directors and writers. Initially, for reasons that cannot be discussed at length within the scope of the present paper, official historiography in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) under Mao did not highlight the importance of the massacre, but rather chose to minimize it. The first novel to treat the topic, written by Hu Feng’s friend Ah Long (Chen Shoumei) in 1940, entitled Nanjing, was not published until 1987 with the title Nanjing Bloody Sacrifice (Nanjing xueji).[6] Similarly, the first research volume compiled by academics from Nanjing in 1962 was classified for “internal” (neibu) circulation.[7] This state-organized forgetting was the main reason for Iris Chang’s outrage at the “forgotten holocaust.”[8] After 1980, whether because of the rise of social inequalities within China and the waning of socialist ideology, or because of the emergence of Japanese revisionists (who, as Korean intellectuals and politicians had pointed out, had always existed), Chinese official historiography began to condone and construct a new discourse centered on Chinese “victims” of the atrocities of Nanjing, through “patriotic education,” pop culture, and, most important, the construction of the Nanjing massacre memorial, completed in 1985. As pointed out by Kirk Denton, this outpour of anti-Japanese rhetoric was characterized by a fixation on the number of dead, which is inscribed in a dominant position in the exhibition of the Nanjing memorial.[9] Hence, ironically, the debate continued to be framed exclusively in the terms of the “deniers” of the Nanjing massacre. Several more recent novels and films have tried to sidestep the binary approaches of Chinese victimization and nationalism: Ye Zhaoyan’s romance Nanjing, A Love Story (1937 de aiqing) and Lu Chuan’s The City of Life and Death (Nanjing! Nanjing!), which may have drawn inspiration from Ah Long’s earlier novel,[10] try to eschew simplification by humanizing the perspective, but without delving into the root causes of the massacre.

Fig. 3: The Yasukuni sword as the symbolic heart of the shrine (left), in the forge (middle), and blended in with archival photographs (right).

Fig. 4: The film moves back and forth between Swordsmith Kariya in the forge and archival photos of Yasukuni with the glowing metal superimposed.

Li Ying takes a completely different approach: by turning to Yasukuni as the heart of what “went wrong” in Nanjing, he displaces the focus to include a broader perspective, in which “the relationship between the individual and the state is [the] important theme.”[11] Yasukuni shrine, situated in the heart of Tokyo, is presented as the epitome of the “ambiguity” or “ambiguous” continuity in Japanese culture, symbolized by the sword, which is the ritual heart of the shrine. As Li Ying has said, his film is “not anti-Japanese,” but rather his “love-letter to Japan.”[12] In this sense, his approach can be compared with the perspective developed in Oe Kenzaburo’s Nobel lecture entitled “Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself” (Aimai na Nihon no watakushi), ironically commenting on the serene Nobel lecture delivered several decades earlier by Kawabata Yasunari, “Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself” (Utsukushi Nihon no watakushi). At the center of the shrine, Li Ying therefore situates the beautiful but ambiguous image of the sword (fig. 3). His use of montage technique, blending images of the red-hot sword in the forge with archival photos, in particular of beheadings, also points to the shrine as a place in which history is “forged” (fig. 4). It is worth quoting Mark Selden’s assessment of Yasukuni as “the centerpiece of what Takahashi Tetsuya has termed the ’emotional alchemy’ of turning the grief of bereaved families into the patriotic exhilaration of enshrinement of the war dead as deities with the stamp of official recognition of personal sacrifice and honor by the emperor . . . , an alchemy sealed in Japanese government payments to deceased soldiers’ families” which finds its symmetrical counterpart in “the alchemy of amnesia . . . . While the military dead were enshrined as kami at Yasukuni shrine and their families received state pensions, the hundred of thousands of civilian dead and many more injured were forgotten.”[13] The film is therefore dedicated to the peculiar form of alchemy that makes beauty out of death. In one interview, Li Ying likens Yasukuni to the cancer that the sword smith Kariya Naoji, his main character, is suffering from, pointing to the paradox of his serene outside appearance and the diseased cells within.[14] The question of Yasukuni is then to understand the coexistence of these two orders of reality.

Fig. 5: Montage of archival photographs of Yasukuni officials and a block of red-hot iron.

In this manner, Li Ying avoids simply condemning the existence of the shrine, but tries to understand its “ambiguous” heart, moving beyond the aggressive nationalism sometimes expressed on its grounds, to the spiritual values it is supposed to embody, expressed in the Yasukuni swords, with both their militaristic and ritual meanings. This ambiguity goes to the very heart of the Meiji project and modern Japan. Founded in 1869 (one year after the restoration), the shrine embodies the continuity of the “Japanese spirit” from Meiji to the present: commemorating the sacrificed victims, rather than the accomplishments, of Japan’s century-long project of “nation-building” (fig. 5).

This historical continuity is highlighted in the film by emperor Hirohito’s speech at a 1968 commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Meiji reforms. Sword smith Kariya listens to the speech in his spare time (fig. 6), in particular to the passage transcribed as follows: “In these 100 years, our country has made startling progress as a modern state, I am overwhelmed with joy; today’s progress has been achieved . . . through the unceasing efforts of the people, together carrying the nation through innumerable difficulties.”[15] This is the discourse of linear progress and modernity, which ultimately justifies the sacrifice of the individual in the name of the strengthening of the nation. In Japan’s case, this discourse is associated both with the Meiji modernizers’ desire to equal and overtake Europe and America on their own turf, but also with wartime aggression and the project to “liberate Asia” from colonialism. In an interview, Li Ying brings up Meiji thinker Fukuzawa Yukichi’s slogan “Join Europe, leave Asia” (Nyu O, datsu A); in a dialogue between Li Ying and Japanese-Korean film director Sai Yoichi, the latter also situates Yasukuni within the “honor student” culture famously theorized by the critical Japanese sinologist Takeuchi Yoshimi.[16]

Fig. 7: Three men relax over a beer in Yasukuni on August 15, 2005.

Takeuchi had underlined, in the early years after the war, that Japan’s modernization project rested upon an understanding of progress and rationality conceived as an imitation of Western capitalism and colonialism. For Takeuchi, Japan’s aim, beginning with the Meiji era, was to surpass the West by being more Western, more developed, and ultimately more colonial than the “West” itself.[17] This kind of critique can also be found in Oe’s Nobel lecture, which underlines that Japanese modernization only took place at the price of deadly and self-destructive wars.[18] Like Europe’s colonial wars, which present-day European governments have found such difficulty in recognizing and apologizing for, Japan’s expansion in Asia was justified in the name of an ideology still seen as progressive by some: freeing Asia from Western influence and bringing progress to other nations. This feeling is very effectively illustrated in the film in a scene where three middle-aged Japanese men relax over a beer in a makeshift beer garden on the grounds of Yasukuni (fig. 7). In this sense, the political project enshrined in Yasukuni is not distinctly Japanese, but also reminiscent of other discourses justifying colonialism or the imposition of material progress, and in fact with the discourse of modernity itself. Hence, Li Ying states in an interview: “I don’t think the real significance of Yasukuni is limited to Japan or even to Asia. It is something the entire world should think about.”[19] In this sense, the ambiguity of Yasukuni is linked with that of modernity itself, in particular with the way it defines the subordination of the individual to the nation-state.

Critique of Modernist History and Historiography

Fig. 8: Kariya Naoji often prefers not to answer the director’s questions, and appears lost in thought.

In many respects, Yasukuni is structured more like a feature film than a documentary. Li Ying highlights the dramatic nature of the film’s structure when he writes: “I make Yaskuni like a stage, and all these people reveal themselves upon it.”[20] The film can indeed be analyzed in terms of its spatial structure rather than as a continuous narrative with a plot, leading to a climax. This also corresponds with a more “postmodern,” less linear style of history, a stylistic choice that is underscored by the absence of voice-over narration. The film is constructed around the central image of the forge in which the Yasukuni swords, and the historical narrative they symbolize, are crafted. Li Ying interviews at length the last surviving sword smith, Kariya Naoji, aged 90, and tries to get him to talk about Yasukuni during the war, and the use to which his swords were put. However, Kariya does not want to talk (fig. 8), and describes himself only as an artisan, a maker of beautiful objects, who cannot be held responsible for their use.[21] In this sense, the film is structured around a central space characterized by silence, and the absence of an interpretive discourse.

Fig. 9: Prime Minister Koizumi explaining that his visits to Yasukuni are “a matter of the heart” (left) and bowing at Yasukuni on August 15, 2005 (middle). Fig. 10 (right): An American supporter of Prime Minister Koizumi waving an American flag and holding up a message of endorsement.

Around this empty center, a whole collection of discourses compete for rhetorical control over the symbolism of Yasukuni, in a manner reminiscent of Ian Buruma’s “Olympics of suffering.”[22] Countless “agendas” are thus aired in the film, drawing on footage shot during the 60th anniversary of the surrender on August 15, 2005. The audience successively sees Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi describing his visits to Yasukuni as a “matter of the heart” (fig. 9) and an illuminated American waving an American flag among a group of war veterans on August 15th to support Koizumi’s visit to the shrine and denounce George W. Bush’s “weak leadership” in failing to endorse Koizumi publicly (fig. 10).

This scene also serves to underscore the presence of the United States and US-Japan relations as the backdrop against which the Yasukuni drama is played out. Mark Selden similarly underscores the paradox that Koizumi’s Yasukuni visits were part of his strategy of firmly tying Japanese foreign policy to the United States, which made them both possible on the Asian stage, and necessary to make the increased dependence on the US palatable to the Japanese people.[23]

Fig. 11: A group of Taiwanese aborigines protesting against the enshrinement of their ancestors’ remains at Yasukuni is met by the spokesperson of the shrine.

Fig. 12 (left): Buddhist monk Sugawara Yuken, requesting that his father’s ashes be removed from Yasukuni. Fig. 13 (middle): Tokyo governor Ishihara Shintaro’s speech at Yasukuni on August 15, 2005. Fig. 14 (right): Two young protesters opposing official visits to the shrine are insulted and wrestled to the ground.

Other scenes give voice to opponents of Yasukuni: a group of Taiwanese aborigines march to the shrine demanding to meet the chief priest and hand a letter to the shrine’s public relations representative (fig. 11). Unlike former Taiwanese president Lee Teng-hui, who comes to the shrine regularly to commemorate his brother who was killed during the war in the Japanese army, these protesters firmly oppose the enshrining of Taiwanese soldiers forcibly enlisted in the imperial army. They are joined by a Buddhist monk, Sugawara Yuken, who demands that the ashes of his father, also a Buddhist, be removed from this Shinto shrine (fig. 12). He explains how the shrine’s philosophy contradicts Buddhist teachings by claiming all who died for the emperor belong to the state, highlighting the problem of Shintoism as the state-sanctioned religion accompanying Japan’s drive toward modernization. Sugawara forcibly asks the shrine’s representative how the information necessary for enshrining his father had been obtained, underlining once more one of Li Ying’s main points: the collusion of the state with the shrine (in this case the state would provide the information directly without consulting the family), thus dispossessing the individuals in question of a personal dimension of their existence and of their right to die and be mourned as they see fit.[24]

A speech by Tokyo governor Ishihara Shintaro, a famous writer and leading right-wing politician (fig. 13 ), is used in the film to illustrate the discourse that frames the attack on China as “self-defense” and as assistance extended beneficently to “backward countries.” Inada Tomomi also appears during this sequence. In direct contrast, the director then inserts footage of two young protesters opposing Koizumi’s visit: the camera follows them as they are insulted and beaten, told to “go home to China,” and finally taken away by the police, by which time it becomes clear that they are Japanese (fig. 14). Again, the film takes no explicit stance, but simply juxtaposes these various agendas around the empty and ambiguous symbolic center of the forge.

Fig. 15 (top): Visitors in the Yasukuni museum. Fig 16 (bottom): Two women talking about Koizumi’s visits to the shrine and their own wish to honor their dead family members.

The sequence dedicated to the museum (fig. 15) is revealing in this respect. While the Yasukuni exhibition, which barely mentions the Nanjing massacre, proclaims “everything is true,” Li Ying’s film completely avoids the question of “truth” that is always crucial to Chinese narratives of Nanjing and the Japanese invasion. It never mentions the debate on the Nanjing massacre death toll of 300,000, thus finally avoiding the framing of the discussion in the terms of Japanese denial.[25] Finally, a short sequence captures two middle-aged ladies chatting on a bench during the celebrations (fig. 16): the camera respectfully keeps its distance, highlighting the essentially private nature of the ritual they are performing and the personal nature of their commemoration of family members who died during the war. In another scene, a lone young man dressed as a soldier bows to the shrine in a kind of private ritual. In this way, Li Ying effectively suggests that the problem of Yasukuni is not so much one of individual memories as of the state-led organization of individual rituals into a grand narrative of nation building, which individuals cannot always opt out of. The implicit critique of hero-worship could easily be transposed to official Chinese narratives of history.[26]

The film ends with a long and carefully crafted ten-minute sequence of archival photographs, framed by aerial shots of Yasukuni, zooming out to a larger view of Tokyo (figs. 17). The photo sequence, accompanied by Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony no. 3, culminates in pictures of kamikaze pilots and the nuclear mushroom cloud, in a reminder of how the Japanese population paid its own toll for the policies of the wartime government. In this way, Li Ying also links his film to recent discussions in Japan on the kamikazes not as heroes, but victims of the imperial state, and more generally about how individuals were used by the state.[27] The final impressive aerial shot suggests, as confirmed by Li Ying in a panel discussion, that Yasukuni occupies the symbolic heart of Tokyo, and its influence continues to radiate out into the modern metropolis that surrounds it.

Fig 17: Sequence of archival photographs framed by an aerial shot of Yasukuni that progressively zooms out to suggest the shrine’s position at the heart of modern Tokyo.

In conclusion, Li Ying’s film effectively deconstructs the overarching narrative of Japanese modernity that underpins the Yasukuni shrine, and subordinates the meaning of individual life and death to state-sanctioned rituals, which are in turn manipulated by politicians. This type of “modernist historiography” is deconstructed as the object of the film, but also as a method or style, the rejection of which is implicit in the way the film is structured. Taking the “grand narrative” of Yasukuni as an object, the film shows that each individual concerned about the history enshrined there has a personal narrative that does not require vindication or sanctification by a higher authority. Nor do these narratives need to compete in an “Olympics of suffering”: as the film subtly suggests in the sequence in which two ladies chat, individual suffering is always incommensurable, and debates like those on the number of victims tend to serve other purposes. Rather than focus on the Nanjing massacre or another example of the destruction wrought by Japanese militarism, the film tries to reconstruct the logic that underpinned this episode of Japanese history and continues to influence today’s Japan. The implicit critique of Yasukuni developed by the film is therefore mainly focused on the relationship between the individual, the state/state religion, and collective memory. It raises the question of whether collective memory should be state-driven and sanctioned (probably not) or entirely left to the individual (various episodes also demonstrate the need for individuals to find a sort of collective symbolism to give meaning to their private memories). The critique is therefore aimed at the instrumentalization of memory, in particular in a nationalist perspective. Nationalism in Yasukuni appears once more as the most efficient tool invented by modernity to subordinate the individual to the state, and of what William Callahan, referring to China, calls “high modernist historiography,” which situates and interprets a “horrific series of events” within a larger logic, in this case the logic of “nation-building.”[28] At this point again, the viewer may be prompted to think about whether other commemorations, for example in Hiroshima, but also in Nanjing, are not instrumentalized in other ways, related to grounding nation-building in victimization.[29]

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